The eleven lines a complete quote names, the three that are usually missing and what they add in the first twelve months — plus the four invoice fields that decide whether the 18% GST you pay comes back to you or simply expires.
Do not compare two Indian development quotes on price until both documents answer the same eleven questions in writing — scope counted in pages or screens, what is explicitly excluded, how many revision rounds, who owns the code, the payment schedule, how fast you must approve things, every third-party cost you renew each year, what is covered after launch and for how long, who holds the domain and hosting accounts, whether 18% GST is inside or outside the price, and the vendor’s GSTIN. Count them, because the cheaper-looking quote is nearly always the one that answers fewer. On the same ₹2,00,000 build, the three lines Indian quotes most often leave out — 18% GST (₹36,000), the third-party services you renew annually (₹3,000–₹32,000) and the maintenance plan after the free support window ends (₹0–₹1,80,000) — add ₹39,000 to ₹2,48,000 in the first twelve months, which is anywhere between a fifth of the build price and more than the build price itself. A quote that is ₹25,000 cheaper on paper and silent on those three lines is not cheaper. It is unfinished.
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The most informative section of any development quote is the one headed “not included”, and almost nobody reads it first. A serious quote for a mid-sized Indian build names between six and twelve explicit exclusions — content and copywriting, stock images, paid plugins and licences, data migration, payment-gateway KYC, app-store fees, SEO, hosting renewals. A quote with zero exclusions has not been scoped; it has been guessed, and the guess gets corrected later at the vendor’s change-request rate rather than at the price you agreed. Every exclusion you read before signing is a number you can plan for. Every one you discover afterwards is a negotiation you will have from a weaker position, because by then the project is half-built and moving is expensive.
Declared bias: ZoopCoder sells fixed-price development, so a checklist that makes quotes directly comparable is not a neutral thing for us to publish — a large share of jobs in this market are won by being vaguer than the next vendor, and this page removes that option for everyone including us. The section on holding your own domain, hosting and repository accounts also removes revenue that some agencies rely on. We publish both because our quotes are itemised anyway, and we would rather be compared on a complete document than win one by omission.
This is the checklist. Print it, put it beside the PDF you were sent, and tick the lines that are actually answered. The third column is the honest part: what it costs you when the line is missing.
| The line | What a complete quote says | What it costs you when it is missing |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Scope, counted | Not “a company website” but “8 pages: Home, About, 4 service pages, Blog list + post template, Contact”. For an app, screens and user roles. | Every disagreement becomes a change request. At roughly ₹12,500 per finished screen, two “small” additions is ₹25,000. |
| 2. Explicit exclusions | A list titled not included, six to twelve items long. | The single largest source of Indian project overruns. Unbounded. |
| 3. Revision rounds | “2 rounds at design, 1 at content, ₹X per round after that.” | “Unlimited revisions” is priced into the quote or abandoned mid-project. Both cost you. |
| 4. Handover list | Source code, database export, admin credentials, design files, documentation — named individually. | A live website you cannot move, edit or hand to anyone else. |
| 5. Ownership | A written assignment of copyright, with a duration and a territory stated. | Paying in full does not transfer copyright by itself — see the ownership guide. |
| 6. Payment schedule | Tied to artefacts you can open, not to dates. 30/40/30 is the honest Indian norm. | Money ahead of work — see the advance-payment guide. |
| 7. Your approval turnaround | “Client feedback within 3 working days at each gate.” A two-sided obligation. | The same 3-week website ships in 7–8 weeks — see the timeline guide. |
| 8. Timeline with gates | Named milestones with what is delivered at each, not a single end date. | No way to tell a slipping project from a normal one until it is too late. |
| 9. Post-launch support | What is covered, for how many days, and what happens on day 31. ZoopCoder includes 30 days. | “Lifetime support” means nothing enforceable. A real plan is ₹3,000–₹15,000+/month. |
| 10. Third-party costs | Domain, hosting, SSL, gateway, SMS/email credits, app-store fees — each with who pays. | ₹3,000–₹32,000 a year you did not budget for — see the running-cost guide. |
| 11. Tax and identity | Price stated before or after 18% GST, the vendor’s GSTIN, the SAC, and the place of supply. | On a ₹2,00,000 build, ₹36,000 that either comes back to you or does not. See below. |
Here is the arithmetic that turns a checklist into a decision. Same website, same vendor, same scope — on the left is what a thin quote puts in front of you, on the right is what the first twelve months actually cost. Every figure on the right is either a statutory rate or a band published on ZoopCoder’s pricing page and its guides.
| Line | On the thin quote | Year one, honestly totalled |
|---|---|---|
| Build (custom web app band) | ₹2,00,000 | ₹2,00,000 |
| GST at 18% | Not stated | ₹36,000 — recoverable only if you are registered and the invoice is correct |
| Domain + hosting renewal | Not stated | ₹3,000–₹32,000 (₹3,000–₹8,000 shared; ₹7,000–₹32,000 on a real server) |
| SSL certificate | Sometimes billed | ₹0 — free via Let’s Encrypt. Never pay for a basic certificate |
| Support after launch | “Lifetime support” | 30 days included, then ₹0–₹1,80,000/yr depending on whether the stack needs patching |
| Content, images, migration | Assumed to be yours | Yours — or a change request at the vendor’s rate |
| Payment gateway, if you take money | Not stated | ~2% of every order, plus 18% GST on that fee |
| Total, first twelve months | ₹2,00,000 | ₹2,39,000 – ₹4,48,000 (1.2× to 2.2× the headline) |
The spread is the point. The low end assumes a GST-registered buyer running a static site on shared hosting with nothing to patch; the high end assumes an unregistered buyer running a custom application on a server with a real maintenance plan. Both are the same quote. Which one you are is decided by two facts you already know before you sign — whether you are GST-registered, and whether the thing being built runs software that receives security patches — and neither of those facts appears anywhere on a typical Indian quote.
This is the part of a quote that Indian buyers almost never check, and it is worth 18% of the project. Rule 46 of the CGST Rules sets out the mandatory contents of a tax invoice. Four of those fields decide whether the ₹36,000 on a ₹2,00,000 build is a cost or a credit: the supplier’s GSTIN, your GSTIN, the SAC for the service — which for IT design and development services is 998314 — and the place of supply, stated with the name of the State where the supply is inter-State.
That last field is the one that goes wrong, and it goes wrong quietly. Under section 12(2) of the IGST Act, the place of supply of a service made to a registered person is the location of that person — not the location of the developer. So a Bengaluru developer billing a Delhi company is making an inter-State supply and must charge IGST. If the invoice instead shows CGST plus Karnataka SGST, the Delhi buyer cannot use that credit at all, because one State’s SGST is not creditable to a buyer registered in another State. Nothing bounces, nothing is flagged at the time of payment. It surfaces months later when the credit does not reconcile.
And there is a deadline on the repair. Correcting a wrongly-headed invoice means a credit note plus a corrected invoice, and section 34(2) allows the details of that credit note to be declared only up to 30 November following the end of the financial year in which the supply was made. Section 16(4) applies the same 30 November cut-off to claiming credit on the original invoice in the first place. So an invoice raised in March carries a real expiry date, roughly eight months away, and on a ₹2,00,000 build the amount that expires is ₹36,000. The fix costs one line in an email before you pay: please confirm the invoice will show your GSTIN, SAC 998314, my GSTIN and the correct place of supply.
| Field on the invoice | Why the buyer cares | What breaks if it is wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier GSTIN | Verifiable free on the GST portal in under a minute | No GSTIN, no input tax credit — the 18% is simply your cost |
| Your GSTIN | This is what attaches the credit to you | The invoice does not appear against your registration |
| SAC 998314 | Identifies the supply as IT design and development services | A mis-classified supply is the sort of thing that gets queried later |
| Place of supply + State | Decides IGST vs CGST+SGST (IGST Act s.12(2)) | Another State’s SGST is not creditable to you. Needs a credit note and re-issue |
| Invoice date | Starts the clock under CGST s.16(4) | Credit lapses after 30 November following that financial year |
| If you are not GST-registered | None of the above recovers anything | Compare every quote GST-inclusive — ₹2,00,000 is ₹2,36,000 to you |
References are to the CGST Act and Rules, 2017 and the IGST Act, 2017, current as at July 2026. This is general information about how the invoicing and input-tax-credit rules apply to an ordinary services purchase, not tax advice for your specific facts — if the amount is material, confirm the treatment with your CA before you pay. The registered-versus-unregistered asymmetry is worked through in more detail in the freelancer-versus-agency guide.
Most Indian quotes are not dishonest. They are written in adjectives, and an adjective cannot be tested at handover. Here is the same promise written both ways — ask for the right-hand column and almost every scope dispute disappears before it starts.
| What the quote says | What to ask for instead |
|---|---|
| “Responsive design” | “Layouts checked at 360px, 768px and 1280px, in Chrome and Safari, on one real Android phone and one iPhone.” |
| “SEO friendly” | “Unique title and meta description per page, one H1 per page, XML sitemap, robots.txt, schema on contact details. Ranking work is not included.” |
| “Up to 5 pages” | The five pages, named. “Up to” is where the argument starts. |
| “Dynamic website” | “These are the things you can change yourself without calling us” — listed, screen by screen. |
| “Payment gateway integration” | Which gateway, who opens the merchant account, who completes KYC (only you can — it needs your documents), and whether test-to-live switchover is included. |
| “Unlimited revisions” | “2 rounds at design, 1 at content, ₹X per round after.” A stated allowance protects both sides. |
| “Bug-free, lifetime support” | “30 days of fixes for defects in the delivered scope”, with a written definition of a defect vs a new request. |
| “Admin panel included” | The list of what the admin panel can actually change — and, more usefully, what it cannot. |
| “Source code will be provided” | “Pushed to a repository in your account from week one, with the developer as a collaborator” — not zipped at the end. |
A fixed price is only fixed against a fixed scope. That is not a loophole, it is arithmetic: the vendor has priced a specific list of work, and work that is not on the list was not priced. The mechanism that handles the difference is the change request, and the honest thing a quote can do is state the change-request rate up front rather than leave you to discover it in week six. Ask for it. A vendor who will not name a rate before the project starts has reserved the right to name it later, when you have no alternatives.
The corollary is the more useful test, and it works on any vendor including us: if someone gives you a fixed price without asking what your admin panel needs to do, who your users are, and how many kinds of user there are, they have priced a guess — and one of you is going to pay for the difference between the guess and the reality. A quote that arrives in twenty minutes with no questions attached is not fast service. It is a placeholder with a number on it. Real scoping questions before a real number is the signal worth waiting a day for.
We sell development, so read this section knowing what we sell. Each of these is a line that appears on real Indian quotes and should not be on yours.
One more that is not a line item but belongs here: do not pay for a project where the domain, hosting, repository, gateway or app-store account is held in the vendor’s name. It costs nothing to open those in your own name on day one and it is the difference between a supplier and a landlord. Indian buyers usually learn this at the exact moment they most need the account, which is when the relationship has already broken down.
Eleven lines, and you should count them before you compare any prices: scope counted in pages or screens rather than described in adjectives; an explicit list of what is not included; the number of revision rounds and the price of an extra one; every artefact handed over at the end, including source code, database and admin credentials; who owns the copyright and when it transfers; a payment schedule tied to things you can open and use; how fast you are expected to approve work; a timeline with named gates; what post-launch support covers and for how many days; every third-party cost you renew annually, with who pays it; and the tax and identity lines — whether the price includes 18% GST, and the vendor’s GSTIN. A quote answering fewer than eleven is not a cheaper quote, it is an unfinished one, and the missing lines do not disappear: they arrive later as change requests at the vendor’s rate.
Almost always because the two quotes are not for the same thing. Three causes account for most of the gap: scope (one vendor counted eight pages, the other counted five and assumed you would supply the rest), exclusions (content, images, migration, gateway onboarding and SEO excluded by one and quietly included by the other), and tax (one number before 18% GST, the other after — an 18% difference on its own). Normalise all three, then divide each by the number of finished pages or screens. A total price hides scope; a per-unit price exposes it.
It must say, and many do not. Development is a service taxed at 18%, so on a ₹2,00,000 build that is ₹36,000. If you are GST-registered and the invoice is correct, it is input tax credit and your real cost is ₹2,00,000. If you are not registered, it is not recoverable and your real cost is ₹2,36,000. Which means an unregistered buyer should compare every quote GST-inclusive and a registered buyer GST-exclusive — and the same two quotes can change places depending on which of those you are.
A serious quote for a mid-sized build lists six to twelve exclusions. The recurring ones: written content and copywriting; photography and paid stock images; logo and brand identity; paid plugins, themes, fonts and API subscriptions; data migration from an old site or spreadsheet; payment-gateway merchant onboarding and KYC (only you can complete it — it needs your documents); app-store developer accounts and their annual fees; SEO and any promise about rankings; email or SMS credits; server and domain renewals after year one; and training beyond the named sessions.
Under Rule 46 of the CGST Rules: the supplier’s GSTIN, your GSTIN, the SAC — 998314 for IT design and development services — and the place of supply with the State named where the supply is inter-State. Under IGST s.12(2) the place of supply of a service to a registered person is your location, so an out-of-State developer must charge IGST; if they charge CGST plus their own State’s SGST instead, you cannot use that credit at all. Repairing it needs a credit note, and s.34(2) allows that only up to 30 November following the end of that financial year — the same cut-off s.16(4) puts on claiming the credit in the first place.
A stated number — typically two at design and one at content — with the price of a further round written into the same document. Treat “unlimited revisions” as a warning rather than a benefit: nobody sells unlimited labour, so it has either been priced into the number you are being quoted, or it will be abandoned when the rounds stop being economic. A stated allowance plus a stated rate turns a future argument into an invoice line you can accept or decline.
You, in every case, and the quote should say so. Domain registered in your name with your email as registrant contact; hosting under your login with the developer added as a user; the repository, the gateway merchant account and the app-store developer account the same way. It costs nothing extra at the start and it is the difference between a supplier and a landlord — when a vendor holds the domain, leaving stops being a decision and becomes a negotiation.
Restate both onto one page before judging either: same tax basis, same twelve months of running cost added to both, exclusions counted, then divide by pages or screens. Two habits help. Send both vendors the identical three-line request — numbered scope list, not-included list, handover list — and see who returns all three. And ask each what they would remove to make it cheaper: a vendor who can answer understands what they priced, while a vendor who only offers a discount has told you the number was negotiable rather than calculated.
Design and development of the agreed scope, complete source code with documentation, deployment and launch assistance (server setup, domain configuration, SSL), training and knowledge transfer, and 30 days of post-launch support at no extra cost. Payment is 30% to start, 40% at the mid-project milestone, 30% on delivery. What is not in a build price — at ZoopCoder or any other Indian agency — is the third-party layer: domain and hosting renewals, paid plugins or licences, SMS and email credits, gateway charges, app-store fees. Those recur every year, they are yours, and the only thing separating an honest quote from a cheap-looking one is whether they were listed before you signed.
Paste or describe what you have been quoted and we will tell you which of the eleven lines are missing from it — including when the honest answer is that the other quote is the better buy. If you would rather just have ours, it comes itemised, with the exclusions listed, within 24–48 hours.